2019: my year of reading…

I’ve not done anywhere near as much reading this last year as I normally would, for a number of reasons, and recently have not felt able to settle down to anything as demanding as a full-length book, so for the last couple of months it has been magazines and online articles, mainly. I have acquired 30 new books this year – so some success on cutting down how many I buy – disposed of a good many more than that, and actually read 53 books in total, so just over one a week. I never imagined the total would drop so low…

I realise on looking through my reading log that I’ve spent a fair amount of time re-reading this year. At the end of 2018, I began working my way through the novels of Philip K Dick again, and got about half-way through them before I got side-tracked; I also re-read some Raymond Chandler, some Garrison Keillor and quite a lot of Ursula Le Guin, prompted by her death earlier in the year. Her work remains as powerful as ever for me, in many different ways. I’m looking forward to tacking her epic Always Coming Home next year.

Why so much re-reading? Looking at my shelves I see that there are so many old favourites still there, which have survived the annual cull of books which head their way to Amnesty International, and I feel drawn to revisit them, and the pleasure I recall in the past. I used to have the feeling, “well, I’d like to re-read that one day…” and move on; nowadays, something follows that thought up with, “get on with it, then!” So I have.

Like many of you, I have a fair number of what might loosely be called “coffee-table books” in a dismissive sort of way: I mean the kind of large format, illustrated books that don’t necessarily lend themselves to a cover-to-cover read, but are for deep browsing; I’ve spent a good deal of time revisiting those this year, too, especially the ones on travel and exploration. Very satisfying.

But it hasn’t been completely a year of re-reads. New discoveries have included R H Mottram’s The Spanish Farm Trilogy – there seems to be a good deal of First World War fiction out there that I still haven’t discovered – and John Barton’s marvellous book on the history of the bible, which I really enjoyed and found very thought-provoking, too. And I really liked the French writer Gilbert Sinoué’s Le Livre de Saphir .

Now we come to statistics and awards. For some reason – and I do wish readers would enlighten me – the most popular post of the year by far has been my brief and instant reaction to Carol Ann Duffy’s poem The Wound in Time, which she wrote to mark the centenary of the end of the Great War. Other posts on poems from that war have also been pretty popular, along with my thoughts on Ismail Kadare’s novel about Stalinism in Albania, Le Grand Hiver. I’m pleased to be reaching such a wide variety of readers, and I still wish I head more from you…

My biggest disappointment this year has been my re-reading of Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines series; I wish I hadn’t bothered and then I might have retained more of my original admiration for his achievement. When researching for the post I just published on him, I noticed there were some prequels and linked short stories, which I will not be bothering with.

Once again, there is no award for weirdest book: obviously I’m not reading weird books at the moment…

I’ll give Philip Pullman my award for best new novel for The Secret Commonwealth, the second in his Book of Dust series. It is on a par with the first one, and I know I’ll have to wait another couple of years for the last in the series.

I’m cheating a bit here, but my award for best novel goes to Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, which is coming up for a re-read pretty soon, so that I can dig a bit deeper than just the plot, and admire what she has done in writing a sequel to a novel no-one imagined there could ever be a sequel to. It’s clever, it’s serious, it’s thought-provoking, and for me everything that a good novel should be.

I haven’t read a great deal of non-fiction this year, but John Barton’s A History of the Bible was outstanding in its erudition, its clarity and its honesty. He isn’t afraid to dig deeply or to ask awkward questions, and yet the Christian scriptures are not diminished or undermined by his forensic examination.

Vassily Grossman’s Stalingrad is easily my Book of the Year: it’s not a new novel, having been written before I was born and published in a number of incomplete versions in Soviet times. What we finally got this year was a very careful edition which is probably as complete and as accurate as can be with a work completed in such challenging circumstances, excellently translated and introduced, and superbly annotated: a work of love by Robert Chandler. It’s the prequel to the astonishing Life and Fate, which has rightly been called the twentieth century’s War and Peace. Only a Russian could have written it, and it is a tragedy that the horrendous experience of Russians during the Nazi invasion and occupation is not better known and understood in the West.

I wonder what next year will bring? So far, press articles about what’s coming up in the next few months have been rather unpromising. And I don’t have any particular plans in terms of what I want to read, although I am currently enjoying re-visiting old favourites, so there will probably more of those…

On historical novels

What, exactly, is a historical novel? I realise that I’ve probably been quite snooty about them at various times in the past, and dismissive of the genre, as not being ‘proper’ literature. But recently I’ve been thinking, particularly as I suspect I’ve been reading and enjoying them without realising…

What I mean is, does any novel set in the past count as a historical novel? Does it depend on how historical personalities and events are integrated imaginatively into the plot? And what, if anything, makes one of these novels count as ‘proper’ literature? I’m not interested in novels populated by kings and queens, aristocrats and royalty, for instance, and I didn’t choose to read Hilary Mantel’s recent novels set at the time of the English Reformation. But that is a historical period I’m interested in, and the novel by Marguerite Yourcenar I reviewed recently was set then, and certainly involved some real persons from those times, as was the case with Luther Blissett’s Q, which I also drew attention to in that same post.

I found myself questioning my attitude because of a novel I’m currently reading, set in the Middle East and Central Asia at the time of Tamburlane, but centring on a number of Arab scientists rediscovering the knowledge of the ancients, as well as pushing forward the boundaries of knowledge. And Jean-Pierre Luminet’s Ulugh Beg isn’t that good: almost non-existent characterisation, and tenuous plot that seems to exist just to flesh out the history of Arab science. I was reminded of John Banville’s novels featuring scientists from history; I tried the one about Copernicus but was so annoyed I gave up. On the other hand, Gilbert Sinoué’s novel about Avicenna I found thoughtful, detailed, interesting and quite moving at times; I got a real picture of people, places and science of the times he was writing about.

Back to my question: is War and Peace a historical novel? Yes, obviously, and so much more. There are real people from history in that novel just as there are, for example, in Vassily Grossman’s Life and Fate, or Anatoly Rybakov’s Arbat Trilogy; all three of those novels go into my – for want of a better word – ‘proper’ literature category.

So I find myself wondering about proportion. You can have a story set in a particular historical context, but with fictional characters; a great deal of care will ensure its plausibility. If you don’t try and weave in too many real characters and events, a reader will suspend disbelief sufficiently for the story to have the author’s desired impact; too many historical characters, as in Luminet’s novel, and I may as well be reading a history book. Thus, for example, Rybakov uses a few carefully crafted and plausible scenes involving Stalin and some of his henchmen, but most of his story involves imagined characters plausibly deployed in accurate background which accommodates them without challenging the reader’s response or credulity too much. With too many historical characters, we perhaps begins to feel more as if a writer is developing a fantasy involving real people and we start to think, would Tamburlane really have spoken/ acted like that? The sense of proportion is wrong and the reader is jolted into noticing that something here isn’t quite right… our credulity is over-stretched.

The imaginative effort also counts for something here, both on the part of reader and writer, I feel. I’m rarely reading a historical novel to escape into the past, I’m reading because I hope the writer’s imagination will be powerful enough in her/ his creation to develop my understanding of a particular time and place in history, to flesh out what I’d have got from a textbook, in the same way that, for instance, a poem by Wilfred Owen develops my understanding of the experience of the Great War.

I’d be very interested in any thoughts on this topic from you, dear readers: it’s quite a new area of reflection for yours truly…

Philosophy in literature

I wrote generally about philosophy in a recent post, and it occurred to me I should develop my thoughts and look at philosophy in the literature I’ve read.

I suppose I must first have met it when I read Sartre‘s novels all those years ago: The Age of Reason, The Reprieve and Iron in the Soul seem to have been compusory teenage reading in the ninetee-seventies – all that existentialism, and attempting to live by it. It made a stunning BBC TV series in the seventies, too, one that I and many others would live to see again, but I’ve never really felt tempted to return to the novels.

Another philosophical novelist I encountered at roughly the same time was Hermann Hesse, and I have returned to some of his novels recently (Narziss and Goldmund, and Siddartha, via Librivox). In the former, his two heroes spend their lives seeking out paths to live by, one through religious and contemplative life and the other through travel, exploration of and involvement with the world; it’s still one of the most moving books I’ve ever read. Siddartha tells the story of the development of the Buddha; it’s still, for me, the clearest exposition of Buddhist teachings and way of life I’ve read, and far more accessible than that faith’s philosophical and sacred texts.

Again, as a teenager, I read Somerset Maugham‘s The Razor’s Edge, another story of the search for a way to live and a meaning to life, a bildungsroman of the kind that would appeal to a teenage male looking out at the potential of the whole world for the first time.

Interestingly, the philosophical novel took a back seat for many years as I got on with living my life, rather than thinking about it. In passing, I encountered Russian novelists such as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, both noted for wandering off-piste to philosophise about the world and the meaning of life for while, whenever it suited them…

One of my favourite novels of all time, which I only came across a decade or so ago, is Ernst Wiechert‘s The Simple Life. It explores and espouses quietism and flight from the world, perhaps a perfectly understandable response to the Great War. And also quite stunning in terms of its evocation of a sense of place.

If asked to choose my favourite travel writer of all time, I think it would be the Swiss traveller Ella Maillart, whose travels and explorations in the first half of the twentieth century led her to India and Hindu philosphy and yoga in her search for tranquillity and a meaning to existence towards the end of her wanderings; Ti-Puss is an account of some of her time and adventures in Southern India.

Most recent discovery of philosophy in a novel (only available in French, I’m afraid) is the story of the eleventh century Arab doctor and savant Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. Gilbert Sinoué‘s novel Avicenne ou la Route d’Ispahan is a marvellous imagining of his life, trials and tribulations.

I’ve often written of, and spoken about, novels that have made me think; those I’ve mentioned above have taken that quality a level deeper, as it were.

On historical fiction…

Yesterday’s review of Laila Lalami’s The Moor’s Account got me thinking further about historical fiction, and the limitations that authors work with as they write in this genre. I mentioned three novels, the one above, Amin Maalouf‘s Leo The African, and Gilbert Sinoué‘s Avicenne, which is about the life of the famous physician Ibn Sina, known in the West as Avicenna. Here, we have works of fiction about the lives of historically real characters. However, they all lived sufficiently far back in the past for many details of their lives to be vague or unknown, thus giving an author wide scope for invention. The history of the times when they lived is known and recorded to an extent, and the names of principal figures and places, and dates of historical events are also fixed. So this combination of known and invented seems to allow for a decent measure of convincing verisimilitude, although it’s perfectly possible that the real person was nothing like the character fictionally portrayed.

I then moved on to thinking about other historical fiction with which I was familiar, specifically novels set during the First World War: here, the situation is rather different. Firstly, the times are much closer to the present – only a century ago compared with five to ten centuries in the case of the novels I mentioned earlier. Events are recorded in much more detail, places and times known with a great deal of accuracy; accounts are available in memoirs and diaries from actual participants in the events. So, what is a writer to do? Sebastian Faulks invents characters in Birdsong, but sets them in detailed descriptions of real places and events. Pat Barker, in her Regeneration Trilogy, uses a mixture of invented and real characters – Wilfred Owen and Siegfried Sassoon figure quite considerably – and Erich Maria Remarque populates All Quiet on the Western Front with a cast of invented characters, and avoids detailed references to places and times.

These writers ‘get away with it’ or else, manage to convince us with invented characters, for several reasons. The canvas of events – the Western Front in the First World War – is sufficiently vast for a writer to be able skilfully to introduce her or his characters into certain events and places and weave them into the broader fabric, as it were: their heroes can blend in, particularly if they are not too high-ranking as to be in a position where they might have potentially been able to have a major effect on events (sometimes known as the butterfly effect). So, Faulks can introduce Stephen Wraysford as a mid-ranking officer because there were so many of them at the time, and he becomes just one of many, whose personal story we follow, and his interactions are all with other similarly convincing imaginary but plausible characters. The battle of the Somme was huge, so at some level Faulks’ participants all become stock representative characters, if I may put it like that.

Working with ‘real’ characters like Owen and Sassoon, Pat Barker sticks to creating a plausible account of their interaction at Craiglockhart, using available material to add credibility; the battlefield scenes involving Owen are again generic. And Remarque keeps everything in terms of detail vague: names of characters, location of the fighting, dates. The fighting itself is very convincing and realistic in terms of description, and he never needs to tell us much about whether particular actions were successes or not: we have a small group of men swallowed up by the enormity of events, and this is what he seeks to convey.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s Sherlock Holmes stories were another work I considered. The setting is real – Victorian London, the times, the kinds of crime – though suitably sanitised and romanticised for a bourgeois magazine audience; it’s another broad canvas, so broad that the author can allow himself to invent a place or a building or a street as necessary. perhaps this might have jarred a little with purists at the time, but today we know no different. Against this background he can invent detective, police, crimes and criminals willy-nilly: as long as the background holds, it’s the plots that draw the reader along.

In the end, it is all surely about the realist myth which lurks behind all novels, not just those with the emphasis on the historical, a myth that every writer of non-fantasy has had to wrestle with since Defoe first marooned Robinson on his island… I feel another post coming on.

Laila Lalami: The Moor’s Account

Another book from my Christmas wish list read and enjoyed! And this is a marvellous and very moving story. Although I tend mentally to sniff a little at ‘historical fiction’ I suppose I actually do read and enjoy quite a lot of it: genre labels are often unhelpful..

Last summer, on my travels, one of the books I listened to in the car was The Journey of Cabeza de Vaca, an account written by a Spanish nobleman of eight years he spent lost, with three companions, wandering around the area that is now Florida, Texas and Mexico, in the company of various native tribes. One of the three companions was the Moorish slave of one of the other three Spaniards; he merits a single line in the narrative, and it’s from this that Laila Lalami has crafted her novel: what would Estebanico the slave have made of the journey, the Spaniards, the natives, his experiences?

Historical novels are limited – obviously – by the facts and details that are known and cannot be changed, which means that the creative efforts of a writer are differently directed: perhaps plot is not so important, because circumscribed by actual events and people; tension and suspense are rather more difficult to make use of when the eventual outcome may be known. Instead, a writer may focus more on empathy, on fleshing out events, characters and their responses to them, bringing them to life, and out of the history books, as it were.

The Moor’s Account is narrated from the viewpoint of an outsider from both worlds: neither conquistador nor native American, he becomes curious and perhaps impartial observer of both, yet with his own personal story and agenda: the plot is initially structured from two interwoven strands as his backstory is imagined alongside his sea journey to the Americas; what he wants above all is to be able to return home, a free man.

Lalami is of Moroccan-American origin, and has read and used some of my favourite travellers (Ibn Battuta and Leo Africanus) as background source material; her novel joins others which explore interaction between West and East, Christian and Moslem at this interesting time in world history, such as Amin Maalouf‘s Leo The African, for example, or which seek to give Westerners insight into the rich life of the Muslim world, such as Gilbert Sinoué’s Avicenne (only available in French, as far as I know). I enjoy these insights into the world from different perspectives; I know I’m reading novels, which are perhaps primarily entertainment, but I find it heartening to find common links of humanity between peoples, races and religions when so many nowadays want to convince us we are alien to each other… and yet, the small, sceptical part of me also wonders if there is not some romanticising of the past lives and interactions between Christian and Muslim worlds? In the end, however, what we share must surely outweigh the ways in which we differ.

Estebanico inevitably observes and interprets the world he sees in a different way from his Spanish masters; sometimes this is helpful to them all, but at others, it seems to him, brings disaster. All four are inevitably shaped and changed by their experiences in various ways – some learn from them and others do not. And our hero, in the end, is torn between his yearning for his home, family and community back in Africa, and the new life and possibilities which gradually reveal themselves to him in the Americas. My final response was also modulated by the realisation (which a historical novel can give) that he throws in his lot with a native people who are ultimately doomed by historical inevitability. It’s a slow, subtle and very powerful read.